FIRE AS FUCK NO QUESTION. I instantly became a fan and cannot wait to see what he comes out with in the new year.

7) “Damn, Gravity” – OKAY KAYA

OKAY KAYA packs it into this baby single and it’s SOOOOO good. You get the sense she’s just doing her own thing and we just get to watch it.

6) “Lean On” – Major Lazer

5) “Cheerleader (Felix Jahn Remix)” – OMI

4) “Sorry” – Justin Bieber

3) “Trap Queen” – Fetty Wap

2) “See You Again” – Wiz Khalifa feat. Charlie Puth

Quiet and touching, somewhat uncharacteristic of Wiz Khalifa and it’s nice to see that side of him. This is one of the most beautiful songs of the year and will be especially powerful to anyone who’s lost someone special.

1) “London To LA“ – Swindle ft. Ash Riser — This one went unnoticed by just about everyone, and I honestly can’t fathom why. There were lots attempts in 2015 to combine the sounds of the American West Coast with the bass accents coming out of the UK, but most came off ham-fisted. This didn’t. Laidback California vibes melt seamlessly into the hard-hitting, Purple Music sound forged by Swindle and Joker themselves. Put simply, this is the best track you didn’t hear in 2015, and the whole album, Peace, Love & Music, is worth a few listens itself.

One of those albums that I put on to listen to and ended up taking notes. I’m not kidding, these rhymes were that powerful. Staples wrote some BITING social justice poetry and backed it up with some seriously nice beats. Drop the mic material.

4) Surf – Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment

The ultimate chill out album. Its sound explores tons of nooks and crannies, plus Donnie Trumpet’s horn interludes are sweeeet. I love Chance’s influence and I love that he avoided letting himself get swept up in society’s demands of hip hop artists like so many musicians do.

3) To Pimp A Butterfly – Kendrick Lamar

2) I Love You, Honeybear – Father John Misty

1) Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit – Courtney Barnett

You can just tell that she has bangs. I love the combination between the jumping beat and Barnett’s straight-faced delivery.

These two are the best for me for wildly different reasons. There’s no doubting that Disclosure’s Caracal wasn’t the earth-shattering album that Settle was, but the truth is that it was never going to be. It took three or four listens for it to fully sink in, but once I realized that it was a) a pop record (as opposed to a house record like Settle) and b) that every track on Caracal sounded better than anything else that came out in pop music this year, it was an easy frontrunner. Conversely, Nadastrom’s LP1 was a curveball years in the making from the group that defined the moombahton movement. A relatively slow-paced and mature album that explores the breadth and depth of dance music in a way that no other artists are doing at present, LP1 exuded sap-free emotion and reflection better than, quite literally, everyone else. Where Caracal was a perfect pop record, LP1 was the most essential hour of house music that saw release in 2015, each track on both albums special in their own rights.